Methods for teaching have made significant advances in the recent past but until the instant invention there was no suitable method of teaching a blind person, or a person with very poor eyesight, the game of chess. Without sight the senses available to a person for perceiving the happening of an event generally perceived only through sight are hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. Obviously hearing and feeling are the only two senses reasonably adaptable to employment for perception of movement of chess pieces. For purposes of teaching chess to the unsighted both the tactile and aural senses are valuable. The present invention, however, is concerned only with the correlation of sounds to the happening of a prior event or sequence of events. That is, it is the use of a non-verbal aural stimulus to reveal the occurrence of a particular past event or series of events which heretofore were cognizable only visually or tactilly.
In one particular aspect, this invention provides a means for teaching the game of chess to unsighted persons by correlating chess piece movements to aural stimuli, so that once the key relating sounds to events is learned, the unsighted person will know the move or moves made by the sounds perceived. In another aspect of this invention, the sounds representing a sequence of moves comprising an entire game of chess can be musically rendered for purposes of entertainment and may be used, for example, as an aural accompaniment to the visual depictions claimed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,955,289, issued on May 11, 1976, to Clifford J. Gillis.
The game of chess is internationally recognized and is a game in which each of two participants are permitted sixteen pieces including eight pawns, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, a queen and a king. Each piece may be moved in a uniquely restrictive fashion. The game is played on a board consisting of sixty-four squares and its objective is for one participant to capture the king of the other participant.
Generally the moves of a game of chess are defined in a notation form which gives the name of the piece moved and coordinates of the square to which it is moved. For example, P-K3 indicates that a pawn has been moved to the third rank in the file whose first rank was originally occupied by the king. This notation often accompanies a drawing of a chess board on which are depicted the chess pieces after a particular move or sequence of moves--though the precise sequence of moves which resulted in the pieces being in that position is not shown and can only be appreciated by reading the accompanying notation.